Cocktails
658 recipes found
The Chadburn
The sweetness of the pear liqueur and port in this relatively simple tiki drink (named for the Chadburn telegraph) make it ideal for after dinner. If, however, you are looking for something more preprandial, Mr. Cate recommends decreasing the amount of port and pear liqueur to 1/4 ounce each. That should do the trick.
Tequila Soleil
Think of the Tequila Soleil as a Negroni (with tequila) meets a spritz (with beer) meets that wonderful feeling of relief only an ice cold drink on a hot summer afternoon can bring. The vermouth — use blanc if you have it, sweet red if you don’t — tempers the drink, but the key to a perfectly balanced Tequila Soleil lies in how you build it. Namely, you’ll want to add the ice last. This small switch in technique has a big impact, keeping the beer from deflating on impact and thus retaining a bubbly, refreshing vibe for much longer.
Reverse Manhattan (Berretto Da Notte)
For the drinks writer Kara Newman, author of the book “Nightcap,” a nightcap can perform many functions, from sending you to sleep to reigniting a conversation to standing in for dessert. The recipe, one of Ms. Newman’s own, turns the manhattan upside-down, with the softer, calming notes of the vermouth taking center stage instead of the sharper, palate-awakening notes of the rye. Ms. Newman said a standard sweet vermouth can be substituted in this recipe in a pinch, but the Cocchi Vermouth di Torino will add elegance and complexity to your last drink of the night.
Christmas Day Clementine Sour
Here’s a cocktail that’s both a tribute to my mother (who loved whiskey sours laced with amaretto) and to my favorite flavors of the Christmas season: clementines, cinnamon and cloves. Juice the clementines a day in advance to save yourself some trouble on the holiday.
Tuxedo
The Tuxedo is a simple affair, made of gin, sherry and orange bitters, that will give any traditional martini a run for its money in dryness. One of the most prominent old cocktail books to feature this recipe was issued by the Waldorf-Astoria hotel bar in 1934. Jarred Roth, beverage director of the Bar Room at the Beekman in New York, gives the drink an added herbal touch by applying a light rinse of absinthe to the glass. To achieve a more traditional Tuxedo flavor profile, simply omit the absinthe.
Sunny Day Real Estate Cocktail
The Los Angeles mixologist Alex Day is a fan of the band Sunny Day Real Estate and named this summery drink after them. The cocktail combines the classic aperitifs vermouth and Aperol with a bright raspberry syrup for a balanced (and gorgeously pink-colored) cooler.
The James Bond Melon Ball
Wenzhou Punch
Hot Buttered Rum
There are many ways to make this classic winter drink. Using brown sugar is traditional, but maple syrup is awfully nice, too. Stirring in the butter with a cinnamon stick while you slowly sip the drink makes for a cozy ritual, but if the sight of a floating lump of butter disturbs you, add the butter earlier in the process, with the sugar—it’ll melt faster. You can also make the drink sweeter (add more sugar) or spicier (substitute spiced rum for dark rum), or both, to your taste.
Basque Country
The equal proportions of vermouth and cider make this cocktail especially easy to pour or batch up. Choose a cider with a bit of tartness and funk, and reach for a quality red vermouth. Sweet and slightly viscous, it stands up to and smooths out the cider’s personality. Finally, don’t skimp on the garnish. The orange, olives and peppers should be deployed in a way that feels less like decoration and more like a snack. Drop the skewer straight into your cocktail to impart notes of citrus and brine — or lay it on top to snack on and sip at your leisure.
Blood and Sand
The Blood and Sand counters the notion that Scotch whisky can't play well in a mixed drink: Without that deep, vital smokiness, this drink would be a much less exciting proposition. In the 1930 "Savoy Cocktail Book," Harry Craddock’s recipe calls for equal parts Scotch whisky, cherry brandy, Italian vermouth and orange juice. I prefer different proportions that allow the whisky and juice to predominate — and I especially like it when fresh blood orange juice is available, both for color and flavor.
Lambrusco Spritz
Think of this as a grown-up, but not too grown-up, spritz. Here, grapefruit brightens and plays up the wine’s light bitterness, while buttery green olives add a touch of earthy brine and serve as a welcome snack. Reach for a lighter, sweeter, more citrus-leaning amaro, to avoid masking the bubble’s nuance. For Lambrusco, seek dry or off-dry bottles, and commit to tasting a few until you find what you like. Two to start with: Lambrusco di Sorbara, which is the lightest in color and flavor, with high acidity and plenty of aromatics, and Lambrusco Grasparossa, which is dark in color and bold in flavor with dry tannins and rich berry notes.
Mula Español
This drink, served at Whisler’s, a bar in Austin, Tex., is a classic Moscow Mule with a Spanish twist, using brandy de Jerez and sherry, as well as ginger liqueur, lemon and ginger beer. Brett Esler urges the use of drier styles of ginger beer, sherry and brandy for the cocktail. For presentation, the traditional copper mug will work, but Mr. Esler says a Tom Collins glass will do as well.
Monte Cassino
Piña Colada
The piña colada, which originated in Puerto Rico, is an irresistible classic, and an occasion to pull out paper umbrellas — a tiki-culture addition. Make sure to use cream of coconut, which adds signature sweetness, versus coconut cream, which is unsweetened. To keep your cocktails extra-frosty, use chilled glasses. Just beware of brain freeze.
Alaska Cocktail
The big question when preparing an Alaska cocktail is the choice of gin. Though most bars make it with London Dry gin, the earliest known recipe for the drink calls for Old Tom gin, a sweeter form of the spirit that was common in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is the recipe found in “Drinks,” a 1913 book by the bartender Jacques Straub, and favored by Jim Kearns, an owner of Slowly Shirley, a cocktail bar in Greenwich Village. "The orange bitters adds a nice, dry, citric note to the end, keeping the cocktail from becoming too sweet,” Mr. Kearns said. While Straub’s instructions do not call for a lemon twist, Mr. Kearns added it anyway, because it “complements the orange bitters so nicely.
Frozen Tom Collins
Think of this frozen drink as a Tom Collins meets Italian lemon ice: It’s refreshingly sweet-tart, boozy and fully capable of giving you brain freeze in a painfully nostalgic way. Since colder temperatures can shift the way we perceive sweetness, frozen drinks read less sweet on the palate and thus require a bit more added sugar to balance flavors. This recipe employs a final flourish of syrupy maraschino cherries, stirred in to taste. If you’re skipping the cherries or don’t have time to run out to stock up, you can simply add a bit more simple syrup to taste while blending. You’ll lose the brilliant color contrast — and the outright fun of snacking on ice-cold, candylike cherries — but, like most good drinks, this one’s adaptable.
Rum Manhattan
Bijou
This classic 19th-century cocktail’s name means “jewel” in French, in supposed reference to its combination of gem-colored spirits: diamond-clear gin, ruby-red sweet vermouth and emerald-green Chartreuse. While the original — often attributed to Harry Johnson, who published a recipe in the 1900 edition of his “New and Improved Bartender’s Manual” — called for equal parts, this variation skews the drink toward modern palates by reducing the amount of green Chartreuse. The final drink is balanced and dry, yet still plenty herbal. Serve and sip as is, or split between two very small, very pretty glasses for a petite-in-stature, big-in-flavor nightcap.
Bitter Giuseppe
Cynar is a low-proof, bittersweet amaro derived from artichokes, among many other ingredients. Italians typically drink it over ice with a slice of orange. But it has found a home in many cocktails thanks to adventurous American mixologists who not only treat it as a supporting player, but also sometimes as the foundation of a drink. Such is the case with the Bitter Giuseppe, a creation of the Chicago bartender Stephen Cole. The cocktail calls for a full two ounces of Cynar. Though audacious in concept, the drink is easy to understand if you think of it as a Cynar manhattan. The lemon juice, lemon twist and extra bitters do much to lighten up the mixture, which is brighter and more buoyant than you might expect. A great aperitivo cocktail.
Bufala Negra
At Philip Marie in Greenwich Village, John Greco uses ginger beer to top a bourbon cocktail seasoned with a splash of good balsamic vinegar, a slight variation on the original made with balsamic syrup and ginger ale, which was created by Jerry Slater of H Harper Station in Atlanta.
Watermelon-Lime Cooler
While coolers are often stretched with something sparkling, this rose-hued drink swaps in a pour of fresh watermelon juice. The inherent sweetness — and deep pink color palette — of both the juice and the Lillet Rosé is tempered with an ounce of gin and a splash of lime’s bright acidity. (If you can’t find Lillet Rosé, use Lillet Blanc or even a blanc vermouth in a pinch.)
Cucumber Collins
Ah, Sunflower!
This cocktail — essentially a tequila sour softened by elderflower liqueur and gilded with a garnish of flower petals and toasted sunflower seeds (which add a surprising crunch) — aspires to capture some of the unambiguous cheerfulness most of us associate with sunflowers and serve it in a glass. It’s named for William Blake’s decidedly ambiguous poem, “Ah! Sunflower.”